Art and Eye

  My eye is drawn to the hand. Those long, bony fingers are so characteristic of Schiele but here they are particularly skeletal and deathly – the veins seem to have been injected with poison. And they are a warning right in the foreground of the painting that keeps the viewer at bay as an outsider to this incredibly intimate relationship between mother and child, and sets the tone of death and mortality which hangs over the whole image. The mother cradles her child in a womb-like shroud, alluding to childbirth and the death of the mother explained in the title. She seems desperate to feel that bodily connection with her child, highlighted by the emphasis on her craned neck as she tries to connect to the baby. There is a clear link between the mother’s bent neck and the child’s bent neck, again emphasising their longing to be with each other. However, the darkness around the child is almost like ropes, with flecks of white in the painting making it look as though the darkness is wo...

  My eye is firstly drawn to the two figures. The artist has used an unknown light source on the larger figure's face, and the viewer always looks to the light first when looking at a painting, perhaps because the light is usually more comforting and safer than the darkness. But not here. Everything about Goya's black paintings signals danger, signals the Gothic and the supernatural, signals humanity's deepest fears. The subject material is ambiguous, but it reminds me of Act Four Scene One of Shakespeare's Macbeth - the famous 'double double toil and trouble' scene. The figure of a witch on the left oddly holds a spoon, quite a modern item for someone so separate from society to be welcomed. Perhaps Goya is suggesting the repressed darkness within humanity through this spoon. Even through a simple utensil, the mind races to try and work out what Goya was thinking while he painted this directly onto one of the walls in his house. Beside the woman is a skeletal c...

  My eye is drawn to the dirty folds of drapery across her hips – they are supposed to cover her yet  simply accentuate her nudity. The loose strokes and curving lines look agitated, at odds with the  mood of the scene. It almost looks like a hand and arm attempting to grab her. The picture is titled  ‘Odalisque’ suggesting a depiction of a harem, an image of languid, Eastern sensuality, a  very popular subject throughout the nineteenth century. To a certain extent Delacroix conforms:  the setting is dark and enclosed, and the woman seems drowsy, her body relaxed into sensual  curves. The pale, soft flesh dominates the canvas, her torso shaped by the dark shadows beneath.  There are just enough foreground details to establish that this is an Eastern scene and so the woman  is not Venus, or a Parisian contemporary. But my first impression of the drapery lingers and makes me uneasy. The woman’s position starts to  look awkward. Her hip and...

  My eye is at first drawn to the colour. That yellow instantly reminds me of the New York taxi cabs, and in my mind I link it to Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie which also tries to capture the city of New York through art. Just as Mondrian used colour to emphasise the pulsating liveliness of the city, Demuth is using it to emphasise speed. The receding five represents the speed of the fire engine that this piece is based on, zooming past the viewer and down the avenue of the city. The red signifies danger, fire, heat, noise. But it also signifies that liveliness of the city and New York as a hub of culture and a hive of activity. It links to the flashing lights of Times Square and Broadway, and it suggests the discordant sounds of sirens wailing down the streets - Demuth is making a piece of art come alive and highlighting art's power to represent not only a place, but a way of life.  Demuth was creating art in the Precisionist style and this is highlighted in I Saw The Fig...

  My eye is immediately drawn to the head of Medusa. At first glance it looks gruesome, as though Cellini has captured the moment just after the head has been decapitated, and it oozes blood and bodily matter. However the viewer then notices the similarity between that and Medusa's hair. Maybe it is just her hair after all. Cellini has cleverly enticed the viewer in here, to take a closer look and therefore involved them in the sculpture as a whole. Once they do come closer, they begin to notice other things such as the similarity between Perseus' hair and Medusa's snakes. Hero and monster are not so separate. Even the features of their faces are very similar. Perhaps Cellini wants to suggest that evil can often wear the mask of good. Or he could even be implying that everyone has some evil within them, even the hero Perseus.  One of the good things about sculpture is that the viewer is able to walk around it, and fully immerse themselves in the piece. Cellini has used this...

My eye is immediately drawn to the vanishing point of the painting, because that is what the use of perspective here is designed to do. My eye follows the leaping hunting dogs into the rows of trees and beyond to where every figure is excitedly heading. Everything about this piece screams symmetry, from the way the trees are positioned to the depiction of the animals and humans. Uccello has even laid down tree stumps and branches on the ground to point the viewer in the direction of one point perspective. By using these foreshortened logs he is spelling it out to the viewer - here is the perfection of Renaissance painting.  Although it may not be the most detailed painting in terms of the actual figures, everyone is at least doing something different. From the figures running into the trees to the men on horseback waving their arms to point the way for the viewer and the other hunters, this is a painting of movement and excitement. You can almost hear the cry of the dogs and calls ...

  My eye is drawn into the painting by the profile of the girl and then through her gaze back out of the frame towards the unseen stage. The lightness of her flesh, the black point of her eye, which seems the most sharply drawn part of the painting, and above all the curving gilt frame behind her all focus our attention on her expression. She is leaning slightly forward, out of the seclusion of the box she sits in. Her lips are slightly parted and her face is hard to read, which emphasises the ambiguity of the piece in general. We do not know what has got her so captivated, but we too are mesmerised, not by the stage but by her features in desperation as we try to read her. Meanwhile, the quick Impressionist brushstrokes that make up the left of the painting mean that the viewer cannot connect with anyone else in the painting. It is almost as if the woman in the foreground will at any moment turn to us and ask ‘did you see that?' Thanks to Renoir’s composition, the viewer is eff...